CNCF Brings the Helm Package Manager for Kubernetes into the Fold
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation continues to expand its stack of open-source tools for running cloud-native computing operations. Thursday, the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) voted to accept the Helm package manager as an incubation-level hosted project.
For many, Helm has been the de facto package manager for applications destined to run on CNCF’s Kubernetes open source container orchestration engine. About 64 percent of Kubernetes users deploy Helm, according to a recent CNCF survey.
“Helm addresses a common user need of deploying applications to Kubernetes by making their configurations reusable,” said Brian Grant, TOC representative and project sponsor, Principal Engineer at Google, and Kubernetes SIG Architecture co-chair and Steering Committee member, in the CNCF blog post announcing the acceptance.
- 330 contributors
- 5,531 GitHub stars
- 51 releases
- 4,186 commits
- 1,935 forks
The software was created in 2015 by Matt Butcher and Jason Hansen, and a company, Deis, was reorganized shortly after the release to support the software and build out additional tools. Microsoft purchased Deis in 2017.
Like operating system package managers, Helm was designed to simplify the process of setting up and running an application on a platform, the platform being Kubernetes in this case. “In building Helm, we set out to build a tool to serve as an onramp to Kubernetes – one that seasoned developers would not only use, but also contribute back to,” Butcher said in the CNCF blog post.
The software allows users to share applications as Kubernetes charts. The applications themselves, under Helm, can be consistently set up across different Kubernetes deployments. The software also provides a way to manage individual Kubernetes manifests, or configuration files.
Helm joins a growing number of CNCF projects, all designed to ease the process of running workloads on cloud services in a vendor-neutral way. Other projects include Prometheus, OpenTracing, Fluentd, Linkerd, gRPC, CoreDNS, containerd, rkt, CNI, Envoy, Jaeger, Notary, TUF, Vitess, and NATS.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Microsoft are sponsors of The New Stack.
Feature image via Pixabay.
